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A Man for All Reasons
Article printed in Church Times November 2005.
I was at a service in my parish church in 1995, when someone introduced the ‘Toronto blessing’ of swooning, jumping, making animal noises etc. It was a memorable occasion - and not least for the sermon. The preacher read from Isaiah, but it turned out that his real text was from The Silver Chair, the penultimate Narnia story.
In this passage, Jill was thirsty. Aslan invited her to come and drink, but she was scared of him. The moral: we likewise, faced with the work of the Spirit, must choose between our fear and our thirst. (I felt neither and so spectated.)
My thoughts were various, but to share two of them: Firstly, that if the church decided to add a writer to the canon, and put it to the popular vote, my money would be on C S Lewis; and secondly, that almost everyone seems to think he’s theirs. He must be the most widely owned Christian writer in centuries.
Among evangelicals he is widely assumed to be an evangelical. He talked so much about conversion, and the scriptures, and so ardently opposed liberal ‘watering down’. There are US evangelical colleges offering courses in Lewisology. And yet he smoked, drank, swore, had friendly attitudes to other religions and a flexible approach to biblical historicity - and he explicitly disavowed the ‘evangelical’ label, which smelt to him of Calvinism.
He is claimed just as much by Anglo-Catholics. He was sympathetic to Catholicism, he valued the sacraments, he accepted purgatory, his spiritual home was the middle ages. And yet he did not agree with transubstantiation or the exaltation of Mary, and had little use for images; and so he refused this label too, putting himself squarely between the two camps: ‘not especially “high”, nor especially “low”.
The net spreads wider. As I say, I have heard him made an apologist for charismania. A creation science website argues that had he lived he would have embraced that cause too. He is pretty much the only Protestant author in my local Catholic bookshop. An Orthodox friend tells me that if Othodoxy had not been simply off the radar in those days he would have found it the perfect fit. Even a pagan (in the Stonehenge sense of the word) correspondent of mine finds is own beliefs in the Narnia stories.
C S Lewis is not just popular then, he is ‘one of us’ to a bewildering variety of believers. He is, almost as much as the original, ‘all things to all men’.
Why should this be? The main reason has to be his ‘mere Christianity’. Lewis managed, to a remarkable degree, to exclude from his writing the classic issues of disagreement between Christians - theories of the sacraments, justification, church, worship etc., etc.
The obvious example of this is Mere Christianity the book, in which he sets himself the task of describing and defending those core teachings that all the denominations agree on - ‘the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times’, ‘the H.C.F.’. His reasons for this approach were that he did not have the theological training for disputing controversial dogma, and more importantly that in a world retreating from Christ it was more urgent and more constructive to be winning unbelievers than to be washing dirty vestments in public. The gulf between belief and unbelief made the cracks between beliefs seem trivial.
But while this approach is the stated strategy of Mere Christianity, it pervades all his other writing too. His books cover innumerable areas of the Christian life from prayer to pornography, and theological issues from the incarnation to heavenly bodies - and yet he betrays almost no interest in rival understandings of the eucharist, or in competing seats of authority. His book on the afterlife, The Great Divorce, manages not only to avoid siding with either Protestant or Catholic understandings, but to make them essentially the same, or at least both essentially right. In his voluminous writings on prayer he only, to my memory, mentions invoking the saints once, to say that the practice has benefits and dangers and that, while it is not his custom, the differences between doing and not doing it are trivial.
This approach was more than a tactic in his public writings, it permeates even his private letters. He kept, for example, in lifelong contact with his former pupil Alan Griffiths who became a Catholic priest, but told him more than once that he did not want to discuss the issues where their churches differed. He told another that he wished no Christian had ever wondered how the eucharist works.
This restraint seems not only a conscious discipline, but a profound disinterest. Griffiths ascribed it to ‘his almost total lack of concern about the Church as an institution’, which sounds right to me. Lewis’s experience and disposition seem to have led him to think far more in terms of the invisible church united throughout the ages, where Milton and Aquinas sit at the feet of Christ, than of the fractious organisations of the visible church. He found at the heart of every tradition one awful Presence that made their squabbles irrelevant.
And this is why we all read C S Lewis and find so much to agree with, so lucidly put, and so little to disagree with; why we agree in finding him a defender of the faith even when we don’t agree what that faith is. And why consequently, when we find his mind has gone places we haven’t, we are willing to follow.
